Paper short abstract:

The paper examines colonial valuation practices around fisheries, to recover the agential quality of reports in association with practices of catch estimation and administrative acts of record-keeping which in turn produce stable geographies of 'demand' and 'supply' in uncertain environments.

Paper long abstract:

The literature on valuation of natural resources lacks not just a wider disciplinary engagement, but is singularly bereft of any historical interest or exploration. This paper follows scholarship that argues for serious examination of the performativity or work of texts, such as scientific and legal documents not just in producing particular effects but importantly for scholars of history, in producing our understanding of the past.

Following conceptual ideas in postcolonial science studies, STS and History of Science, I argue that the agential performativity of specific intersecting documents, namely scientific reports on fish maws, administrative protocols on fish catch monitoring as well as commodity status reports are all critical to our understanding of how value in a historical sense is understood by scholars.

The paper examines historical valuation practices around 'improving' fisheries in British India, which included evaluations and assessments not just of fish catches but also of fishers, their technologies, capabilities and 'mentalities'. I examine the gradual intensification of administrative publications on these subjects and the attended institutionalisation of scientific and bureaucratic practices around both fish catch estimation, record keeping of resource monitoring and periodic status reports on fisheries in the Madras Presidency in the early 1900s. In so doing, I attempt to recover the agency of documents in producing effects, in this instance, stable geographies of fish 'demand' and 'supply' in politically and ecologically uncertain spaces. I suggest that valuation practices linked to 'management' are sites where both community and state are produced.